Thursday, 20 January 2011

WALK THE WILD ROAD - THE FIRST STEP ALONG THE ROAD

My father died in 1989 at the age of 96. I was 47 at the time – so I was two years younger than he had been when I was born. There was much more than a large age gap between us. He was a child of the late Victorian period and I was born during the second world war and destined to be a child of the rock‘n’roll era. I must have seemed mysterious to him with my love of Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley - "Put him out of his misery," he used to say when I was playing the music of my heroes . He certainly remained a mystery to me.

His generation didn’t talk much about themselves so I learned almost nothing about his early life: his years in Brazil and Argentina where, in his late teens and early twenties, he worked as a telegraph operator; his decision to come back to Europe in 1915 because his twin brother had enlisted and my dad felt that he couldn’t let his brother fight alone; his years in the trenches; how and where he met and married my mother. All of this remained largely unspoken to me. And perhaps I was not curious enough to ask and insist on answers. I suppose it all seemed so impossibly long ago and far away. If he’d been a Second World War RAF pilot, or had been captured and held in ColditzCastle perhaps I would have plagued him to tell me all about it.

My dad in uniform during World War One

And then, when he died, I wanted to know everything – too late, of course. I asked my three sisters, all much older than me, and they knew more, much more. I had known that he liked women –he was much more obviously chatty and at ease with my wife than he was with me, for example – but now I was hearing suggestions about possible affairs. A more astonishing revelation, though, was to hear that he had been sent to prison sometime in the early1930’s. Even my sisters didn’t know the full story but they told me that he had apparently pilfered a small amount of money while working as a clerk in the Post Office. He was charged with ‘Theft as a Servant’ and sentenced to three months in Wormwood Scrubs. Even more shocking, in a way, was the news that the ‘breakdown’ that he had necessitated him going away to hospital when I was twelve was, in fact, a failed suicide attempt. He had tried to gas himself.

Suddenly this man whom I had taken for granted as my old, rather uninterestingly ordinary father, turned out to have a complex past. I wonder what he must have felt when he read my book, BUDDY, in which the young Buddy’s father is sent to prison. Did he wonder if I knew about him? And did I, in fact, know about it at some subconscious level, having heard whispers as I was growing up? How I wished to be able to talk to him about it all. Why had he taken the money? Was it because it was during the Depression and he needed it to support his family? What had driven him to try and take his life? He would have hated having to answer questions like that, I’m sure, and would have clammed up and kept it all locked away inside him.

But having found out all these things about my father, I now wondered about his family. His father, my grand-father, I vaguely knew had come from Poland. He had died ten years before I was born and, perhaps because of that, I had, again, been totally lacking in curiosity about his life. When I asked my sisters about him, they were able to tell me their memories of him as a man – warm and funny and friendly - and a few things about his life in England but very little indeed about his life in Poland. But what they did tell me really aroused my curiosity. Apparently he had left his home in Poland in 1870 when he was twelve. He had walked alone to the sea – a journey of nearly 200 miles. He had got on a boat, had gone round the world a couple of times and then, at about the age of fifteen, he had landed in London.

What a fabulous story! One which begged many, many questions. Why did he leave home? How long had it taken him to walk to the sea? Where had he caught the boat? But when I asked, no one could give me answers. A few guesses – poverty had driven him out. As the eldest he had taken the decision to go in order to leave one less mouth to feed. But just guesses.That was it. A few tantalising facts and nothing more. How could the details of such an adventure have been forgotten in just one generation? Or had they never been told? Had my grandfather, like my father, been a secretive man?

Whatever the reason for the lack of detail, the spine of the story - a twelve year boy alone on the road – was fascinating. And over many years, while I wrote other stories, I kept thinking that one day I would use it as the basis for a book.

4 comments:

"If he’d been a Second World War RAF pilot, or had been captured and held in Colditz Castle perhaps I would have plagued him to tell me all about it."

I doubt it. WWII would surely have seemed just as much ancient history as WWI. Certainly it did to me, and I was born in 1946 - when it had only just finished. As a small boy I used to wonder why grown-ups always said "Of course before the war...", because it seemed indescribably distant to me. (It seemed hard to believe the world could have existed before I did, or perhaps that I could ever NOT have existed.) Anyway, none of the men I knew ever talked about their WWII war experiences, and by the time I was a teenager nothing was more boring than all that Dam Buster & war-comics stuff. I was wrong, of course, but that's how it was.

I think that the five year difference between you and me was vital in terms of attitude to WW2. When I was 11-14, WW2 war books were virtually all I read and I loved WW2 movies, too. That whole period, which in my family was spoken about in terms that made it seem like a golden time which I had missed, fascinated me. There was a glamour about it for me which the muddy, bloody trench warfare of WW1 singularly lacked. Unlike you, Guy Gibson and the RAF warriors were heroes for me.

I agree, though, how any time before one is born seems so remote that dinosaurs probably roamed the world. Scary to think that today's young people probably view the '60s, which are like yesterday for me, the same way I viewed the late 19th Century.

Hey there Nigel Hinton, Walk the wild road seems like an interesting book, I will be sure to read it. By the way, i remembered when you came to our school in guangzhou and you told amazing and funny stories. Keep up the good work and I hope you visit some schools in malaysia in the future. :)

Hi Rais. Good to hear from you. I remember my visit to Guangzhou very well. I had a great time. I hope you do go on and read WALK THE WILD ROAD. Let me know what you think about it. All the best, Nigel

About Me

I have written 20 books, including the BUDDY trilogy and the four books in the BEAVER TOWERS series . Five of the books - COLLISION COURSE, THE FINDERS, OUT OF THE DARKNESS, BUDDY'S BLUES, and TIME BOMB - have won prizes. I have had a number of short stories published in various collections.
I have also written screenplays for TV and movies, and lyrics for songs, including the songs for the soundtrack of the movie BUDDY'S SONG for which I got Gold and Platinum discs. My latest songwriting project has been the nine songs for a stage adaptation of BEAVER TOWERS.
I frequently visit schools in the UK and other countries including China, Germany and Eire to give talks to pupils about writing.